John Updike Quotes
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
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I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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'The past is the past,' Harry goes on, 'you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning.'
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Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.
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Janice Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
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One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
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I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
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No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
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Nelson '...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife.'
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Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
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Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
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...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.
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Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
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'The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.'
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At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.
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'Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?'
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His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.
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re the human heart That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
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There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
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'...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.'
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Dr Breit 'It's irrational, but so's the human species.'